I am deeply saddened by the recent failed conciliation between the players and the board of Symphony Nova Scotia. Our local orchestra is a treasure; it is difficult to express how important it is to this city and region.

Our department, for one, simply could not function without having these professional classical musicians available to teach our students. And yet we are just one of many cultural institutions in the region that benefit from having a professional orchestra in Halifax.

Many members of the orchestra teach at Acadia University and the Maritime Conservatory. Children who study ballet at Halifax Dance get to participate in the Nutcracker every year, accompanied by a professional orchestra. Symphony Nova Scotia players have been involved with the revolutionary movement to address social injustice through music with El Sistema in New Brunswick. Local presenters like the Music Room Chamber Players, the St. Cecilia Series and Scotia Festival of Music also couldn’t function without a reliable roster of first-rate musicians to fill their programs. The Symphony musicians populate festivals and chamber concerts throughout the Maritime provinces, often in ensembles they have established themselves, including the Blue Engine String Quartet, Rhapsody Quintet and Réjouissance.

Beyond their jobs with the Symphony, these contributions to musical culture feed into the local economy in tangible ways. These musicians use the services of local recording engineers; purchase equipment; pay rent for venues; rent trucks for moving equipment; pay for printing services for brochures and posters; and purchase insurance from brokers for their instruments. They also bring other musicians in from elsewhere (as the Symphony does), contributing to the tourist industry through hotel bookings, restaurant meals, taxis, etc. And when they come to Halifax to take up their positions, they often bring spouses or partners with them, who contribute to life in Nova Scotia. They have children who need to be clothed, fed, housed, educated, kept healthy and entertained, all of which contributes to a healthy local economy.

And what are these musicians asking for?

Over two years, they would like their base scale to rise from $28,000 to just over $30,000. About half of the musicians in the orchestra receive the base scale (regardless of the number of years they have spent in the orchestra), while the section leaders receive 25 per cent more than the base scale, so $35,000 at the current level, and $37,500 if the base rises to $30,000. By my calculations, all of this would cost the Symphony board no more than $90,000 annually.

Let’s put this into context. The German city of Munich, which is three times the size of Halifax Regional Municipality, budgeted 23 million euros ($30 million Cdn) this year for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. Considering the differences in size of population, this means we ought to be able to come up with $10 million to fund our own city orchestra. But instead, the city’s average grant since 2005 to Symphony Nova Scotia has not only NOT been in the millions, it hasn’t even been in the hundreds of thousands. Since 2005, the average grant to Symphony Nova Scotia has been $17,916. It is no exaggeration to say that the difference is staggering.

But that’s Europe, and we all know that the attitude towards arts and culture in Europe is different from here. So let’s consider Orchestra London, the local symphony in London, Ont. London’s population is similar to HRM’s, a little smaller in fact, with 350,000 in 2006, compared to our 400,000 in 2010. In 2012, Orchestra London received $482,688 from the city, 27 times the amount that HRM supports Symphony Nova Scotia.

In 2011, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, which serves a combined population of 758,000, received $689,510 in city support. Factoring in the difference in population, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony receives a city grant 20 times larger than what Symphony Nova Scotia receives from HRM.

What would it take to bring the base salary of the symphony players to $30,000? An additional $90,000 from the city, bringing its total contribution to $107,916, a hundredth of what the City of Munich provides, a sixth of what Kitchener-Waterloo provides, and less than a quarter of what London, Ont., a city of a similar size to HRM, provides. Surely the board, the city and the province can work out a solution to bring these players’ salaries up to $30,000 a year.